1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a broadcast verification system for a wired or wireless broadcast transmission for radio, television or a like.
The present application claims priority of Japanese Patent Application No. 2000-142359 filed on May 15, 2000, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
2. Description of the Related Art
A Commercial Message(hereinafter referred to as a CM) is broadcast in a manner that a broadcasting station signs a contract with a client including an advertiser or an advertisement agency and broadcasts voice data and/or video data provided by the client. Though CM broadcasting time is roughly predetermined, since a schedule of a program is sometimes changed due to an occurrence of emergency news, due to convenience of the program itself, or a like, time for broadcasting the CM is not exactly determined.
It is important for the clients to know whether a desired number of the CMs has been broadcast at an intended time. According to a conventional broadcast verification system, the broadcasting station assures, by submitting a broadcasting confirmation report to the client at every end of a month, that the CM has been broadcast as agreed between the broadcasting station and the client.
However, contents of the broadcasting confirmation report, because it is reported by the broadcasting station itself, does not undergo a verification by a third party. Such the system of submitting the broadcasting confirmation report has been long supported by business practices. Because of this, even if a fraud is committed, it cannot be checked easily; for example, there is a case where, even if the CM was not broadcast as agreed in the contract, the broadcasting confirmation report is submitted reporting that the broadcasting as agreed in the contract has been carried out as agreed.
As a method for checking whether CMs have been broadcast as agreed, a client's visual check on the broadcasting of CMs is conventionally and generally employed. However, human verification has problems in that it costs much and, when the number of channels or CMs to be checked increases, the number of humans making such verification has to be increased accordingly. Another problem with the visual check is that checking accuracy fluctuates depending on a health condition of the human making the check. Moreover, it is necessary for an advertiser to make an investigation on results of broadcasting of CMs not only for his/her own company but also for rival companies or different industries from a viewpoint of marketing implementation, however, the method using the above human verification costs much as well.
The above description is also true for distribution of videos or images other than CMs. For example, distribution of a news video having a logo of a source broadcasting station at an other foreign broadcasting station is widely carried out today. However, as in the case of the CM, a system in which the source broadcasting station can grasp time, place, and number of times of broadcasting the video is not available. The source broadcasting station cannot choose but to believe reports submitted from the other broadcasting station as to which news video has been distributed or but rely on the human verification as in the case of the CM.
To solve this problem, a broadcast verification system is disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. Hei 7-79206 which is used to verify whether a CM is broadcast or not. In the disclosed technology, an automatic identification of broadcasting of a CM is performed by judging whether the broadcasting of the CM is started or ended depending on whether voices from, for example, a television (TV) becomes soundless while the TV is ON and on whether images being broadcast are greatly changed, by taking out these voice signals while these phenomena occur and by comparing these voice signals with those stored in advance.
However, if the check on the CM broadcasting is made only by the voice checking method, following problems occur. That is, CMs for some health drinks and soft drinks have their various versions and, even if the CMs have the same voices, in some cases, they have different images. In this case, since differences in versions cannot be found out by the above broadcast verification method using voice recognition, even if an old version CM is broadcast after the version of the CM is renewed, it is impossible to distinguish the old CM from the new one.
Furthermore, a system to verify whether a CM has been broadcast as agreed with a sponsor is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Sho 56-8938 in which checking is made as to whether the broadcasting of CMs is detected in a time band, in the number of times and on date, as agreed, by detecting an identification number that has been incorporated in the CM broadcasting. However, since such the identification is predetermined uniquely by each of the broadcasting stations, it is impossible to verify whether a CM that has been broadcast by other broadcasting stations has been broadcast or not.